Trump cancels planned January pay increase

President Trump announced Thursday that he was canceling a pay raise due to most civilian federal employees in January, citing budgetary reasons.

In a letter to congressional leaders, the president wrote that locality pay increases would cost $25 billion. Those increases would come on top of a 2.1 percent across-the-board increase for most civilian employees.

“We must maintain efforts to put our Nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and Federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases,” Trump wrote before announcing that for 2019, “both across-the-board pay increases and locality pay increases will be set at zero.”

The Democratic National Committee described Trump’s letter as “yet another slap in the face to American workers” by the president, while Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., called it “the latest attack in the Trump Administration’s war on federal employees.